American Independence and The Art of the Plausible‏

In the academic world one needs an area of expertise. It is even better if one can stake a claim to a new, unexplored area. One may not necessarily be correct in the new thesis; the creative and unclaimed nature of the notion is often enough. One comes up with an idea--the more provocative the better--develops a thesis to accompany it and then develop and nurture it as your own franchise. Interviews and tenure may follow. This is The Art of the Plausible.
It is the essence of revisionism. One takes a well established historic event and recast it with as little Procrustean effort as possible into a new, fresh concept. Eskimos, because they survived, are a culture superior to the Ancient Greeks, because they did not. Shakespeare was a Catholic. But any innovation will do. The Freudian franchise. The various takes on the Kennedy Assassination. The Nazca Lines of Peru are proof of extraterrestrials. Crucial is the ability to take such ideas and elevate them from simple interesting coffee house banter to a marketable academic--or simply popular--franchise.
One of the more startling such concepts popped up on C-Span recently, the novel idea that the United States rebellion against the British was not rooted in a desire for independence but just the opposite: It was an effort to protect the Colonies from the rising British abolitionist movement. (Irony is a great assent in The Art of the Plausible.)
The first European nation to engage in the Transatlantic Slave Trade was Portugal in the mid to late 1400's. Captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. 
To start with, British traders supplied slaves for the Spanish and Portuguese colonists in America. However, as British settlements in the Caribbean and North America grew, often through wars with European countries such as Holland, Spain and France, British slave traders increasingly supplied British colonies.
The exact number of British ships that took part in the Slave Trade will probably never be known but, in the 245 years between Hawkins first voyage and the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, merchants in Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves, with merchants in other parts of the British Empire perhaps fitting out a further 1,150 voyages.
Historian Professor David Richardson, has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the Americas. Only the Portuguese, who carried on the trade for almost 50 years after Britain had abolished its Slave Trade, carried more enslaved Africans to the Americas than the British (the most recent estimate suggests just over 5 million people).
Nestled into these centuries of abuse are a number of legal debates that peppered the British courts. Where did the Magna Carta place slaves? Did a slave converted from paganism have a different status? In 1772, Somerset vs. Stewart debated the movement of an escaped slave in Britain and the legality of his resale per Common Law.
Looking over the timeline of the world's evolving opinion on slavery one can see a remarkable development, almost a "contagion of conscience,"  as small cities and city-states gradually outlawed slavery and the flow moved from Europe--where there were few slaves and the consequence of the decision was less--to North America, then South America, then Asia and finally the Middle East where the illegality of slavery is relatively quite modern--within the last several generations. (ISIS excepted.)
(Note to self: "Contagion of Conscience" possibly a Plausible notion?)

Great Expectations and Their Judgments

A fascinating case has just bobbed up in the Italian Courts. In the city of L'Aquila in central Italy, six scientists and a government bureaucrat have been sentenced to six years in jail for failing to predict an earthquake that killed 300 people in 2009.

This is a spectacular insight into how people think and what they expect. Usually we run into the streets with torches and pitchforks because someone exceeded their authority or moral limits. Here the scientists failed the community by not living up to the community's expectations, despite the fact that the community's expectations were absurd. No one can predict earthquakes. Nor can they read Tarot cards. But some people believe and, if enough Tarot card readers end up on a jury of your peers, some strange things can happen. You need go no farther than the Wee Care Nursery School or the Fells Acres Day Care Center.

Clearly the jury believed that these poor people were responsible for following nonexistent protocols for unknown processes towards imaginary solutions. This is hauntingly reminiscent of modern popular American politics where alternative energies that do not exist and no one uses are touted and financially supported as a solution to our energy problems.

Sometimes the self appointed experts can claim too much. But usually they can find safety in the cynicism and short memories of their electorate victims. Here the fantasies have grown a judicial arm.

When Experts are Wrong

Time Magazine has just named Robert Howarth, a guy who has published not "controversial" but "wrong" papers on the relative byproducts of gas and coal, as one of its "People Who Mattered". There is no way you can get rid of these people. If Lamarck were alive today he would have a talk show. Part of this is our refusal to have judgments because we think being "judgmental" is arbitrary. Part is we have respect for controversy as dialectic, as productive. And part of this is unbridled partisanship, "my opinion right or wrong."

Hanger has a nice blog on energy and this is an excerpt.

From John Hanger:

"In the words of Time

"Robert Howarth...who produced one of the most controversial scientific studies of the year; a paper arguing that natural gas produced by fracking may actually have a bigger greenhouse gas footprint than coal. The study--strenuously opposed by the gas industry and many of Howarth's fellow scientists--undercut shale gas's major claim as a clean fuel."

Time also named Anthony Ingraffea and Mark Ruffalo, as the people who mattered in the fracking debates, which Time declared to be the environmental issue of the year, eclipsing climate change.

Howarth and Ingraffea's study has been debunked by 6 or more studies, all finding that coal emits twice the carbon on a lifecycle basis, but the Howarth paper did matter. It has done major damage to the cause of reducing carbon pollution by so badly misleading millions of people around the world about the carbon impacts of using coal or gas.

On the bright side in the USA, natural gas displacing coal is one reason that US carbon emissions will fall in 2011 and probably again in 2012. But for shale gas that now supplies 34% of all USA gas, the price of gas would likely be over $8 per thousand cubic feet and uncompetitive with coal.

Had Howarth won a broad ban of shale gas, the result would have been devastating for consumers, and especially for low-income families, and the nation would be building more coal plants and not closing many of the 231 units now scheduled to end operation.

While Horwath mattered a lot in 2011, he was unable to prevent substantial carbon reductions resulting from replacing coal and oil with gas. Thank goodness for that."

Coal, Gas and Hot Air

While on the topic of inexplicable influences on the culture and society we can not overlook the strange open-mindedness we have for totally discredited people and opinions. These are especially common in science which the public cannot seem to understand despite all the information conceivable. The overwhelming difficulty seems to be in understanding the limits of studies, how evaluations cannot be perfect and how conclusions are often only extrapolations, not decisions. So otherwise reasonable people deprive their children of vaccines on the advice of an exposed scoundrel.

The debate over gas exploration supplies another example.
"Natural gas has been widely touted as a clean energy source that will help the U.S. transition to renewable energy options while lowering greenhouse gas emissions relative to other fossil fuels. While it is true that end-use combustion of natural gas emits markedly less carbon dioxide (CO2) than other fossil energy sources, methane (CH4) losses during modern gas exploration and development, as well as processing, transmission and distribution may fully negate these CO2 savings. A full accounting of modern gas development indicates that natural gas may actually exacerbate, rather than mitigate, global climate change." This is an overview of a paper by Professors Howarth and Ingraffea that analyze and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coal versus gas energy. But six recent studies have criticized this paper and have dismissed it: Carnegie Mellon University study financed by the Sierra Club, the WorldWatch Institute study, the National Energy Technology Laboratory Study, the University of Maryland, other researchers at Cornell University itself, and CERA. Yet despite these papers Howarth continues to be quoted and lionized, recently by Robert Kennedy, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Chesapeake Bay Journal.


Everyone has an agenda, everyone their own ax to grind. No one wants to surrender any ground. This type of behavior is a hallmark of non-science. Science is where truth is the only agenda. But in non-science opinions will lurk forever in the background, like vampires, long after they are dead and buried.

JFK: The Movie and the Problem

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the 60's and 70's was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is a unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway.

The Art of the Plausible

Every American ponders starting a business. There is some genetic confidence the Americans have in their ability to do it, the belief it has a local and even national social value, and they have the inverted view that such a risk is a virtue. Of course the technical and scientific fields are fertile here but many wonderful creations have emerged from the softer areas.

The Freudian franchise comes to mind at once. Freud was wonderfully creative; one need look no further than his Moses and Monotheism, a much more entertaining work than his psychological fiction. But rather than pursue the "Moses as an Egyptian" idea, he stayed with the psychological product. Brilliantly he merged it with the genius of Sophocles to give it historical and intellectual heft. (Imagine how different life would be if he had chosen the beautiful writer, Webster, and saddled the West with a generation of The Duchess of Malfi and lycanthropy.)

What raised this question was a comment on the phrase "Psychological Homogeneity" yesterday, a phrase coined to highlight the disparities often seen in pathological personality where one would expect the pathology to bleed from one discrete area into another but somehow does not. This is more than a Bill Clinton-like compartmentalizing, it is a true parallel life that allows the ax murderer to move seamlessly through his nonviolent world, as comfortable as a bigamist. It is not simply the absence of guilt or the apprehension of capture; there seems to be a true comfort these people have in both entities. Unlike Jekyll and Hyde, they are the same man, with no chemical interface.

"Psychological Homogeneity" has "The Art of the Plausible", a creation that has a reasonable appeal that fits an inherent preconception. Like so many notions, "right brain, left brain", the value of trans fats, the inherent instability of societies with disparate incomes there is an appealing and totally improvable logic in the concept. This is a fertile field for entrepreneurs. The plan would be to get some start up money, endow a university chair, set up a charity with a few high profile personalities and start employing the kids.